BaCon – A free Basic to C translator for Unix-based systems

The example code (linked to directly from that page) is cool. I think the whois client is especially nice:

http://www.basic-converter.org/whois.bac.html

It's just a very simple way to talk over a network.

Mainly, though, this project is simply cool. It's a shell script which takes a useful dialect of BASIC and converts it into odd but not totally unreadable C. It helps this is a more Pascal-like BASIC instead of being an Object-Oriented BASIC; even so, some of the translations are fairly clever.

I actually found out about this via the GnuCOBOL FAQ. I found out about that because I'm just an odd kind of individual.

http://opencobol.add1tocobol.com/gnucobol/#bacon

In fact, the author of the GnuCOBOL FAQ sums up my feelings about BaCon quite well:

> Nicely done. Not a toy.